It is an undeniable fact that mathematics is still viewed as a field best left to men. In addition to mathematics, women are still under-represented in professions connected to science and engineering. This is especially true in India. However, there are some women who paid no heed to the stereotype. They solved complicated mathematical problems and were pathbreakers in the field. Their remarkable gumption paved the way for more women to study, teach, and conduct ground-breaking research in mathematics.
Parimala Raman
She received numerous national and international honours, including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (1987), and is well-known throughout the world for her contributions to algebra. Parimala, who is well-known for solving the second Serre conjecture, studies algebra with links to number theory and algebraic geometry. She was selected as the plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, earning her one of the greatest worldwide distinctions in mathematics.
Neena Gupta
She was awarded the coveted 2021 DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from impoverished nations, becoming the fourth Indian and third woman to receive it. The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) administers the prize in collaboration with the International Mathematical Union (IMU), the Department of Science and Technology, and the Government of India. She is a professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata and a scholar of the highest calibre. Her outstanding contributions to commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry are well-known. Her solution to the Zariski cancellation problem earned her the Indian National Science Academy's Young Scientist Award in 2014. Additionally, she received the 2019 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award in the mathematical sciences category.
Sujatha Ramdorai
Dr Sujatha Ramadorai, a math professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research's School of Mathematics, is the first Indian to receive both the ICTP Ramanujan Award and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award. Dr Ramdorai’s experience lies in the study of motives, noncommutative Iwasawa theory, arithmetic geometry of elliptic curves, and algebraic theory of quadratic forms. Her first research focused on the idea of quadratic forms in algebra. After that, she worked on algebraic variety arithmetic. She has made significant contributions to the non-commutative Iwasawa theory, which was created by Japanese mathematician Kenkichi Iwasawa and integrates techniques from algebra, number theory, and representations of Galois groups.
Mangala Narlikar
She is a prominent figure in the field of mathematics who interests range from algebra, topology and number theory, to analytic geometry, and real and complex analysis. Over the years, she has published several papers such as Theory of Sieved Integers, Acta Arithmetica 38, 157 in 19; Mean Square Value theorem of Hurwitz Zeta Function; Proceedings of Indian Academy of Sciences 90, 195, 1981; Hybrid Mean Value Theorem of L-Functions; Hardy Ramanujan Journal 9, 11-16, 1988; and so on. She has made a significant contribution to igniting interest in the topic among laypeople by writing numerous pieces in magazines such as the Scientific Age, simplifying ideas so that everyone could comprehend.
Mangala began teaching the children of her house help and later even joined an NGO that taught girls living in the slums for free. While teaching them, she discovered over time that she was capable of making math easy and enjoyable for them. As Chairperson of Balbharti, she made significant contributions and major changes in the state’s vernacular curriculum By writing books and making fundamental changes to the way textbooks were published. Every child could afford her books because they were priced at ₹10 each.
Kavita Ramanan
A professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, she received an MSc from the university after earning a BTech in chemical engineering from IIT Bombay. In her academic career, Prof Ramanan has held positions as a technical staff member at Bell Laboratories' Mathematical Sciences Centre and an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Mathematical Sciences Department. In 2018, she was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, Roland Dwight George Richardson University. The areas of probability theory, stochastic processes, and their applications are of interest to Prof Ramanan. She has been at the forefront of developing new mathematical methods to study networks of randomly evolving interacting processes and creating tractable approximations that shed light on a variety of random phenomena that occur in statistical physics, chemical reaction networks, wireless communications, disease transmission, neural networks, and phase transitions.
She has been elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2018), the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science (2018), the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (2019), and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2013). She is also the founder of the Math CoOp, an organisation that creates open-access math presentations for students ranging from elementary school to undergraduates.
Image source: Wikimedia, Google